Wednesday, December 9, 2009

We used three healers on this fight on the first week, just to "stay safe," though it can be successfully two-healed (EDIT: especially with the nerf to Marrowgar's damage on the tanks). With the need to spread out, many raiders may go out of range of your healing, so coordinate with your co-healer(s) to ensure that your combined healing will blanket the raid, even if you have to raid mark each other! Your biggest concerns in this fight are:

Coldflame: A line of blue fire that jets out from Marrowgar in a straight line. Don't line up with other players to get run through together; the less you line up, the less you'll have to move. Don't walk in blue fire, don't stand in blue fire, fire=bad, etc. There will be a lot of moving, regardless, but fortunately that's something we druids excel at in healing.

Bone Spike Graveyard: Toss a HoT to whoever is spiked (he only spikes one person at a time in 10-man); the rest of the DPS should break them out shortly. If they take a while to break the spike, you may have to put heavier heals into the spiked player(s). If your co-healer is spiked, you need to heal more heavily to make up for them until they are freed.

Saber Lash: don't stand with the tanks. Both tanks will be taking damage, of course, so you will need to be healing both. Keep the HoTs going. In 10-man, this only requires 2 tanks; I hear that in 25-man it will hit 3 targets.

Bone Storm: he targets someone and chases after them, whirlwinding. Run away :) His aggro will reset when he stops whirlwinding, so be sure you are decently far away from him when this happens, but close enough that you can keep HoTs rolling on the tanks.

Lady Deathwhisper

A bit more difficult than Marrowgar; I recommend using only 2 healers for this to maximize dps (we wiped when we used three!). She has two phases: in the first phase, there will be adds spawning that the dps/tanks will deal with while you heal everyone and the raid tries to burn down her mana shield (with damage). In the second phase, the tanks grab her while you heal everyone and dodge ghosties.

In phase 1, she will be casting shadowbolts at random players, and there will be adds running all over that must be picked up and tanked (they spawn in waves first from the left side, then the right side of the room, and alternate spawn sides) and they need to be killed by appropriate dps:

Adherents by melee

Fanatics by casters (prot pally is a good tank for these)

When any add gets empowered, they start dealing aoe damage; as a healer, try to hang in the center of the room so you can keep range on everyone, as there will be a lot of healing to do. You will also need to be cleansing curses.

Phase 2 begins the moment she runs OoM and her mana shield falls; there is no threat reset, so make sure you put a tank between yourself and the boss when she's near to transition! Have your DPS interrupt her Frost Bolts, stay out of the death and decay, and be aware that the tanks will be swapping the boss between them because she stacks a threat-reduction debuff on them. If a ghostie starts pursuing you, run away from the group so that its explosion doesn't AoE the whole raid (it'll just despawn if you outrun it long enough). Phase 2 felt much less chaotic than phase 1 to me.

Gunship Battle

Grab a jetpack, even if you aren't on the boarding crew. Why? Because it's fun :D Play with it before the battle begins, bouncing around deck, but don't fall off. Jetpacks will not shift you out of bear/cat form, though having rockets strapped to your rear is a bit awkward. I recommend keybinding your jetpack where you can easily reach it.

One healer will need to cross to the other ship to deal with the enemy captain with a tank and 2-3 DPS. The goal is not to KILL the enemy captain, but to keep him busy while the DPS kill off the spellcasters that are frost-blocking your own ship's cannons: you will have to do this every 25% of the enemy ship's health. While on your own ship, don't stand in rocket-strike patches. EDIT: if the boss is tanked right on the edge of the ship, healers don't need to jet-pack over to be able to reach the tank. This will let you continue healing through the whole of the tank's experience getting smashed in the face, without having to worry about your own jetpack.

Boarding Party:

Shortly before boarding, put up full HoTs on the tank.

Tank should cross first, with dps and healer jetpacking over on his heels. Using the jetpack WILL shift you out of treeform, but you can continue casting insta-cast spells while flying through the air: make use of your rejuvs, lb's, swiftmend on the tank as necessary while in the air.

The tank should pull the enemy captain to the near railing of the ship and tank him there while the DPS starts killing the casters. Keep full hots on the tank (including regrowth) and be ready to spam nourish at a moment's notice: keep him topped off as much as possible. The captain stacks up a battle-fury buff on himself when attacking the tank which limits how long you can hang out over there before he just eats through your tank, so killing the casters quickly is a must. Switching back to your own ship allows time for the enemy captain's buffs to wear off.

Once the casters are down, the DPS and healer should rocket back to your main ship, with the tank going last (coordinate it in vent). Again, keep the tank topped off while in the air, using your insta-casts.

Defending Party:

The attacking sergeant will whirlwind, so stay out of range of him. It is generally a good idea for your melee to be on the boarding party, and ranged dps on defense.

The sergeant will put a healing debuff on the tank (Wounding Strike), reducing your heal effectiveness by 25% for 10 seconds. Just keep pouring the heals on.

Heal everyone. Don't stand in fire.

The enemies will all get stronger each 25% of the fight. Let your defending party's dpsers (or yourself, if the other healer will cover incidental damage while you do so) jump in the cannons when they're unfrozen to attack the enemy gunship, and when you damage the gunship down, it will retreat and allow you to dock at the entrance to the citadel, where Saurfang awaits.

Deathbringer Saurfang

This is the most difficult fight of the first wing. I recommend adding the following debuffs to your raid frames, to monitor who has them:

The biggest key to this fight is spreading out, and staying more than 12 yards away from everyone else, because he will target random players with a bomb that will hurt anyone else within 12 yards. You really want to limit how much damage he does to the raid, especially when Blood Link is active (it will speed up how quickly he can mark people).

We arranged ourselves as such:

We assigned two ranged dps (purple here) to kill the adds when they spawned; they stood in the two corners of the room, while healers stood in the center. If you get aggro on an add, don't let it hit you, as each attack will bring Saurfang that much closer to casting another Mark on someone.

Pour healing into the tank. An offtank can be set up to taunt Saurfang off whenever the MT gets a Rune of Blood debuff, because the debuff will heal Saurfang as he attacks the tank; alternatively, you could go as we did and use a pure DPS in place of the OT to just burn through what is healed, and not taunt it off the MT. That tends to result in a longer fight, however, so though we did it The Hard Way, you can set up an offtank and get it done faster ;) EDIT: Saurfang was hotfixed to heal twice the amount he did before when attacking a target he has put Rune of Blood on. I recommend going with a two-tank strat.

As the fight wears on and people get Mark of the Fallen Champion, you will need to heal them nearly as much as you're healing the tank to keep them alive. Avoid letting them die, as each time one of the Marked dies, Saurfang will heal 5% of his health.

3.3 Resto Changes and ICC for 10-man guilds

I'm looking forward to the rest of the instance opening up! I had no problems healing with my old (non-CF, relatively low haste) spec and no glyph of rapid rejuv. I needed to cast nourish a fair amount along with my HoTs; I didn't find I needed to change my healing style from how I played in ToC. There was a fair amount of raid-wide damage as well, making my current glyph choices of WG, Nourish, and Swiftmend still feel the most useful for me as a ten-strict raider, even over the Rapid Rejuv glyph.

I would consider the glyph of Rapid Rejuv useful on the Saurfang fight as a single HoT to handle the Boiling Blood, but not necessary, as Boiling Blood lasts 24 seconds anyway, and the damage can be buffered with other heals (such as LB or your co-healer, or JoL, or totems...). Some may certainly prefer the glyph, but I am not seeing it as a necessity :)

13 comments:

Goggle
said...

I healed the first 3 bosses of IC10 last night. With server trouble and a later than usual start we didn't get time to do Saurfang.

Two comments:On Marrowgar I found Saber Lash to be incredibly punishing. We two heal everything and he'd cast 4ish in a row hitting each tank for upwards of 17k. If one of the healers was impaled when he did it we were in serious trouble. A lot of docs seem to say saber could be split between three, but it didn't seem to work when we chucked a dps DK in there.

Rapid rejuv is amazing. I dropped LB for it (not using WG.) I could easily notice the increase in healing and did not mind that I couldn't blanket quite as much.

Interesting on the Saber Lash. I saw the strats mention hitting three targets as well... maybe it meant on 25-man?

We usually run only 2 healers, but we had 3 of us avail last night, and decided to go healer-overkill. I don't recall us having a healer get spiked... usually it was the poor ret pally (who was targeted about 5 times). It made me curious if it targeted melee first... good to know that's not the case, and it was just luck of the RNG.

Marrowgar is one of those fights that (imo) lends itself very well to just using three healers, and was the main reason I suggested we use it last night in our attempt. It's just a fight where range plays a large role due to the high amounts of movement and with the potential for one healer to be taken entirely out of commission, it just feels more controlled. Not to mention, there really isn't any DPS sensitive aspect to the fight (unless there is some hard enrage, but we didn't see it).

@fallingleavesandwings.Love your blog <3I didn't intend actually using three tanks, just slapping a high HP plate melee in there to split it around a bit more. While I'm sure the ability does (or is intended) to only split between two, Wowhead still lists the 10 man ability as a three split. /shrug.

Three healing does seem a lot safer, especially while gearing up but my two available offspec players are also some of my best dps. I'll probably just ask my tanks to pop cooldowns if I get impaled next time.

Kae, thanks for this guide - I'm starting in on ICC hopefully soon with my guild, and I feel so out of the loop when it comes to new ICC stuff (really new 3.3 patch stuff in general...) I'll definitely come back to this post before the raid =)

Thanks for the post Kae. I found that I did not need to change my healing style for ICC 10. However, I went to heal ToGC 10 later in the week and it was awful! Consequently I have respec'd and gotten my haste between 490-550 depending on the gear I use. I can't tell how much spell power I need to/should give up for haste. Anyone know of where that information is?

@Goggle. I was glad to see you only recently dropped the LB glyph. I was catching some flack for that from my group. I too have replaced it with Rapid Rejuv. It doesn't seem too hard to keep the hot up.

For a flat 1 second GCD, assuming you have WoA totem and the moonkin/ret pally auras active and no Celestial Focus, you would need 856 haste rating. With only WoA totem, you'd need 961 rating.

It's not necessary to reach EXACTLY that cap, however. Play it smart and don't gimp your healing power by shooting for something hard to reach. In fact, something as low as a 1.05 second gcd (where you have 5 hundredths of a second above the cap) only takes 659 haste rating with WoA + ret/moonkin aura. With 550 haste rating and those two buffs (common in 25-man raids, less reliable in 10s) you're still looking at about a 1.08 second GCD.

I think your choice of WG glyph is poor considering at no point it will be utalized, just because it has the ability to heal an extra player doesnt mean it will, Rapid Rejuv, Nourish and possibly swiftmend or normal rejuv is the way to go. WG is so wasting a glyph slot in 10 man. Its frustrating seeing it.

I make good use of my WG glyph. There are very many times where it reaches 6 people, as my raid groups up, or I act as a bridge to share the Wg across the group.

Just because some guilds or players don't know how to maximize it doesn't mean others don't; nor is Rapid Rejuv the best choice for all druids, especially those who like to make use of rejuv for Swiftmend (a longer hot for longer switmendability) or slower raid damage, when lifebloom acts just fine for faster HoT tick healing.